Right leaders at right time transformed downtown Phoenix.

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is one of the anchors of the major new Arizona State University campus in the heart of downtown Phoenix that has helped revitalize and grow an area that was once deserted after 5 p.m.(Photo: Michael Schennum/The Republic)

Story Highlights

Ten years ago this spring, Michael Crow unveiled an audacious plan for Arizona State University. In just his second year as ASU's president, Crow announced that the university would create — from scratch — a major new campus in the heart of downtown Phoenix. Some of the university's signature colleges, mainstays of the Tempe campus for decades, would be uprooted and moved.

The new campus, despite the absence of a funding plan or even space to build, would be operational in just a few years. It would grow to 15,000 students. And, the new president vowed, the city of Phoenix — led by the newly elected mayor — would be an integral partner in the creation of this new state institution.

"We are about the business of building one of the great universities in American history," Crow told hundreds of university leaders, professors and staff in April 2004. "Can you build this university in one place? The answer is, unequivocally, no."

Reaction was mixed. Some expressed deep anxiety, believing programs moved to Phoenix would become irrelevant and wither away. Others were unfazed; they were confident the new campus would never materialize.

Less than two years after Crow's bold proclamation, Phoenix voters approved a $223 million bond to pay for an ASU downtown campus — an unprecedented investment in higher education by a city.

Five months later, the fledgling campus opened.

Today, ASU's downtown Phoenix campus is completing its eighth year with more than 10,000 students — about the same size as the University of San Francisco, Southern Methodist University and the University of Maine. Students learn and live in 11 buildings across a vibrant 20-acre campus that is home to five colleges and 84 degree programs.

In many ways, the creation of the downtown Phoenix campus was a perfect storm: The right leaders, in the right place, at the right time, with a shared vision and a willingness to take risks.

Phil Gordon was mayor for just three months when the plan was announced, but he had been pushing privately for an ASU campus a year earlier. In an October 2003 breakfast meeting with Crow, the pair sketched out the design of a downtown campus on a paper napkin.

Gordon and other city leaders — particularly Greg Stanton, the current mayor who, as chair of the City Council's education subcommittee, was a major player in the ASU plan — were convinced that infusing a critical mass of people into the urban core would breathe much-needed life into an area that mostly shut down after business hours. A university could be the perfect social, cultural and economic remedy.

"It was a big risk," Gordon said. "Would it work? No city had ever done it. Why should a city invest in a university?" The former mayor said both he and Crow "put our futures at risk."

Crow, for his part, badly needed space to grow ASU, and that commodity was quickly running out on the Tempe campus. But the need for more space was just part of his reason for a downtown campus. The new president saw the possibilities of the nation's sixth-largest city serving as a laboratory for aspiring policy makers, health professionals, journalists, social workers and other public-service professionals. And he saw it as a key part of his vision for a "New American University," one in which the university is deeply embedded in the community.

The aspirations for the campus became reality despite the project coming of age amid the worst downturn since the Great Depression. ASU "almost instantly turned around a downtown from a place that closed down after 5 o'clock," Gordon said.

The campus today includes nearly 1,200 students living in a twin 13-story residence hall and another 1,200-plus who live within 5 miles. More than 1,300 faculty and staff work on the downtown campus, and many live nearby as well.

Tax-revenue figures help illustrate the impact of what Jeremy Legg, the city's economic-development program manager, calls "a tale of two cities." From 2005 to 2013, sales-tax revenue was relatively flat citywide, but in the downtown district, it more than doubled — from $4.2 million to $8.7 million annually, according to city data. And those figures do not include the burgeoning area just north of campus between Fillmore and Roosevelt streets.

Construction expenditures have been another economic driver. Investments in campus construction and renovation will be more than $500 million by 2016, and annual operating expenditures are in the $110 million range, according to ASU Senior Vice President Richard Stanley, the project's financial planner from the beginning.

Beyond the numbers, ASU has changed the face and feel of downtown. The area around Central Avenue north of Van Buren Street was, at its best, desolate; at its worst, scary. Civic Space Park, punctuated by an iconic net sculpture, replaced empty lots and abandoned storefronts. New academic buildings that have won national design awards stand where there were once parking lots. Formerly deserted streets now bustle with pedestrian activity. New restaurants and shops are thriving in spaces that were empty for years. Near campus there are new hotels, more new restaurants and a steadily growing nightlife.

The campus has impacted downtown in other ways. Hundreds of students are engaged in internships at nearby government agencies, health clinics, non-profits and media outlets. The College of Nursing and Health Innovation runs two clinics for local residents. The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication covers the city and region with a daily news service and a nightly PBS newscast. The College of Public Programs operates a center that assists local non-profits. And the campus annually hosts hundreds of public events.

Within a few weeks, construction is expected to begin on the Arizona Center for Law and Society, a $129 million project that in 2016 will be home to the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. Meanwhile, the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts is expected to expand the art studio programs it brought to downtown's Warehouse District earlier this year, a move that Stanton believes will ignite development there.

Stanton and Gordon say the campus has vastly exceeded their high expectations. Yet the city-university partnership has not been duplicated anywhere else, despite increasing financial strains on universities and urban cores in need of economic stimulation. But as the economy strengthens nationally, that may change.

In Florida, state legislators recently set aside $2 million to look at the possibility of building a University of Central Florida campus — with up to 15,000 students — in downtown Orlando.

Officials from other cities have visited to examine the Phoenix-ASU model.

Stanton, who was influenced by his own college experience on an urban campus, Marquette University in Milwaukee, said Phoenix is experiencing an unprecedented revitalization and "this renaissance wouldn't be happening if it weren't for ASU."

"The success of ASU as a university and the success of the city of Phoenix economically, artistically, culturally, are one and the same. Our future is tied to the success of ASU," the mayor said, adding, "We are just getting started."

Christopher Callahan is the founding dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and vice provost for ASU's Downtown Phoenix Campus.